It is not a typical footballer's tale of youthful hardship. Aaron Mokoena will play for Portsmouth at Wembley in the FA Cup final against Chelsea and then captain South Africa at the continent's first World Cup but he might have failed to see his 12th birthday if his mother had not dressed him as a girl to hide him from an atrocity in the grim days of apartheid.

Mokoena's township of Boipatong near Vanderbijlpark was the site of a massacre in June 1992, when Inkatha party members, aided by the police, swept in by night to kill more than 40 people, including pregnant women and children. In the aftermath, it was rumoured that the murderers wanted to purge the township of its next generation of men.

"I was still young, only 11 years of age, but I remember the following day that I was on my way to school and people were coming back, crying," Mokoena said. "That's when we heard there had been a massacre. It happened at night when people were sleeping. It was awful.

"After the massacre, there were a lot of rumours saying that these people wanted to kill the young boys. So my mum had to protect me in any way and she decided to dress me as a girl. She also took me to this community hall where there was enough protection for people from the township, especially the boys."

Mokoena was the youngest of seven siblings and he lost his father when he was only seven. "My sisters and my brothers really experienced apartheid," he said. "Afrikaners were really in control of our township because it was not very far from their territory. So it was easy for them to control.

"For other townships as well, it was really, really bad. The story I tell is what we went through in the small township where I was born but it was not an isolated thing."